Computer systems, and servers in particular, form an information backbone upon which companies now rely on almost exclusively for data storage, data mining, and data processing. These systems are indispensable for the improved efficiency and accuracy at processing data as compared to manual human processing. Furthermore, these systems provide services that could not be realistically accomplished by human processing. For example, some computer systems execute physical simulations in hours that would otherwise take decades to complete by human computations. As another example, some computer systems store terabytes of data and provide instantaneous access to any of the data, which may include records spanning decades of company operations.
Within the large amounts of data, groups may have sensitive information that should remain confidential. One threat to maintaining confidentiality of this sensitive data is during data erasure. Conventionally, data erasure does not destroy the erased data. Rather, the portion of a physical storage device that contained the erased data is marked as available for writing of new data. Not until new data is written over the erased sensitive data is the sensitive data destroyed.